When comparing Google Calendar vs Slack, the Slant community recommends Google Calendar for most people. In the question“What are the best Material Design apps?”Google Calendar is ranked 2nd while Slack is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Google Calendar is:

The app leverages Google Maps when adding location for an event by offering suggestions as well as offers opening Maps to help get directions to an event via shortcut on a reminder notification.

Day, 3-day and week views split up the days horizontally and hours vertically. Month view lays out all days in a grid and displays up to 3 events in a day.

Schedule view displays an agenda view that allows browsing all events by swiping vertically. Additionally, the way events are displayed in the agenda view is context-aware. For example, adding an event called "gym" will display the event on a background with a dumbbell.

All views except for month view can be split horizontally to display a condensed month view at the top that can be navigated by swiping horizontally.

Events can be added from any view by clicking the red plus button that's available at the bottom-right corner of the screen.

Pro

Integrates well with other Google services

Google Calendar is part of the Google ecosystem, it integrates with services like Google Now for creating events, Google Maps for directions and Gmail for pulling information about planned flights.

Pro

Can set on-screen and e-mail reminder notifications

Google calendar allows setting how many reminders are needed with each having the ability to set how long before the event the notification should remind and if it should be done via on-screen or e-mail notification.

Pro

Color-coding for events and calendars

The app will color-code different calendars in different colors as well as allow selecting a different color for each event.

Pro

Allows subscribing to public calendars through web client

Through the Google Calendar's web client, it is possible to subscribe to any public calendar. Google also maintains a list of public calendars for various sports events and holidays in different countries and for different religions.

Pro

Offers creating events from e-mail messages based on content

Google Calendar integrates with e-mail for quickly creating events from e-mails that contain the word "meeting" or dates or times, or any other information about events or plans that it can understand.

Pro

Straightforward event creation with autocomplete

All views have an option of adding a new event by tapping the plus sign at the lower right corner of the screen. This opens up a form and allows the user to add a location, start/end times, guests, description, color-code as well as choosing if it's an all day event, how often it repeats, how many and what kind of reminders are needed and setting the users availability and privacy settings.

Pro

Supports non-Google calendars (requires accessing web client)

Google Calendar can be integrated with any calendar that support iCalendar format, including Exchange and iCloud, via URL, but it has to be done using the web client.

Pro

Lots of third-party widgets

Google Calendar comes with a home screen widget, and there are also many third party widgets developed for this calendar app.

Pro

Awesome flairs / images view inside the agenda view / event page

Whenever you enter agenda / event title with the keywords (when available), the event will show up interesting flairs whenever the keyword inside the agenda / title you typed matches the flairs that are available inside the system, examples such as haircut, cycling, swimming, coffee, movie etc.

Pro

Advanced functionality available through IFTTT

IFTTT offers over 198 channels to plug into the users Google Calendar.

Pro

Robust integration with a huge number of tools

Slack integrates with tools like Trello, GitHub, Dropbox, Mailchimp, and dozens of others, so you can have a centralized event feed of your project right alongside your chat. This is tremendously useful for keeping context with your discussions.

Pro

@mentions

You can ping people to get their attention even if they are not online by @mentioning them. Slack supports desktop notifications.

Pro

Very polished user experience

The entire Slack interface is polished and intuitive to use. There are very few bugs or inconsistencies in the UI and it's very fast to use. There is nothing in particular that is new with Slacks implementation of team chat, but the execution of the groups (called channels), search, external service integration and notifications is close to perfect.

Pro

Drag & drop files in channels

You can upload a file to any channel over HTTPS simply by dragging and dropping.

Pro

Apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mac OS, Linux, and Windows

Slack has apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mac OS, Linux, and Windows to give you the full functionality of Slack with some extra features not found on the website on most major platforms.

Pro

Fantastic search functionality

You can deep search messages, files and snippets. Given Slacks integration into many external services, Slack is good enough to act as the central search interface for your entire team.

Pro

Syntax coloring

Pasted code can be colored based on syntax.

Pro

Supports multiple teams

You can be signed into multiple teams simultaneously and quickly switch between them.

Pro

Edit messages easily

It allows you to change what you sent by hovering to the message and selecting "Edit message" under the ellipsis (...).

Pro

Inline link previews (photos, mockups, etc.)

When a link is added, some content in the link is shown such as image - like how Facebook does it when you share a link.

Pro

Emoji reactions to limit excessive posts and notifications

Pro

Flexible, granular notification settings

Notifications are handled separately for mobile and the web app. You can receive notifications for all messages, just direct messages, or based on filters, and you can have different settings for different channels: you don't have to get notified every time someone pushed to GitHub or every time someone posts to off-topic chat, unless you want to.

Pro

Freemium plan

Free forever, only restriction on searchable message archives, up to 10k of your team’s most recent messages and 10 apps or service integration. Great for trying out first.

Pro

Slackbot extensible chat robot

The "Slackbot" can is an extensible robot that can be set you remind you about tasks, auto respond to certain phrases and a variety of other functionality.

Pro

Shows local time of each participant

You can click on the profile of a user to see their local time. An especially useful feature when members of your team are working in different timezones.

Pro

Dev team is invested, responsive, and friendly

Having submitted both feedback and support requests for bot development, I can personally attest that the team takes feedback seriously, and responds quickly to communication. This is vital for any closed-source or hosted project.

Pro

IRC connectivity over SSL

Pro

Multiple channels for different groups

Pro

Self chatting

Creative implementation which is very good for personal journaling or drafting/collecting ideas. Previously, to do this, users needed to create a private channel with themselves. Note that some other team-chat apps may disallow creating group/channel with no 2nd person(s).

Pro

It can surprise you

There's a checkbox in preferences under advanced options that may surprise you.

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Cons

Con

Privacy concerns

Google integrate all their services to connect and mine information on an individual to better profile and target advertising.

Con

No weather forecast

The Android app version of Google Calendar does not show any weather forcast information, even if it is added as an extra calendar in the web application. Being that weather is tied into Google Now, the absence is surprising.

Con

Some recurrence options not available

If you want to add a recurring event based on quirky (but normal) calendar rules, it's not supported by Google Calendar. For example, if you set up a financial calendar in Google Calendar and an event falls on a weekend or bank holiday, Google Calendar cannot schedule the occurrence properly. Worse yet, if you submit those calendar occurences via VEVENT details, Google Calendar displays different information if you use the mobile calendar vs. the desktop web calendar.

Con

No natural language input support

The Android app has no natural language input support, while it's available using the web client and in a limited capacity using Google Now.

Con

Google tasks do not show on Google Calendar

You can create tasks in your desktop Google Calendar but they will not sync nor show up in your android Google Calendar

Con

Once you create a event on a Calendar, you can't move to a different Calendar

Con

Month view shows limited information about the event

Month view does not show how many events there are in each given day or color-code them in any way, only informs of their existence.

Con

Weak default view

Even if month is set as default view, as soon as you touch a day or an event, you have to carefully select twice to get back to month view.

Con

Time zone is incorrect no matter what's done

Con

Timezone for Moscow is incorrect

Timezone for Moscow is 1 hour off. This makes the calendar unusable in Russia.

Con

Setting up non-Google calendars requires accessing web client

There is no ability in the Android app to access other calendars. This limits the usefulness for people that use more than one calendar, such as OSX and iOS users.

Con

Expensive when you need to upgrade

At $6.67 per user / month (or $8 if billed monthly) , Slack is significantly more expensive than the competition if you need features such as unlimited integrations (more than 10) or unlimited message storage (more than 10,000). However, the free version of Slack includes unlimited users.

However if you need only unlimited messages you can use storage services like https://slarck.com to upload then browse and search your entire message history, while staying in Slack's free plan. So with a combo of Slack+Slarck this con is not that major.

Con

No self-hosting available

If you are worried about third-parties getting access to your data you should consider self-hosting. With self-hosting you are in control over where your data is stored, who has access to it. You will also not be vulnerable to exploits of a third-party provider.

Con

Hidden max limit of free users per channel

Slack says that their free accounts support an unlimited number of users, which is true. However they don't mention that there is an undisclosed maximum number of users per channel (8462). For a large open source community, this is something to keep in mind.

Con

Proprietary (non-free/libre)

Con

Linux client is very RAM intensive

Con

"Native" desktop apps are web apps

While it's great that Slack provides installable apps for Windows, macOS, and Linux, they're just the Slack web app wrapped in Electron shell. This means they don't offer the same level of native UX that a truly native toolkit app would.

Con

Slow and lags sometimes

Con

API doesn't allow custom widgets in chat

Con

No E2E encryption

Data is sent of SSL only, not E2E encrypted.

Con

Awful performance and constant glitches, since it is Chromium-based

You will experience a lot of hangs and glitches and it eats immense (for as basic as UI is) amount of RAM.

Con

API is overall very poor

Can't do much with integrations.

Con

Replies are the worst feature implementation of all time

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